03.02.17

This seems to be the only thing that this ‘group’ is bragging about, even months down the line

Screenshot taken minutes ago

Summary: Dominion Harbor touches and plays with fire when it gets patents from a patent troll with thousands of satellite firms, but that’s what it’s all about anyway (a patent “monetization firm,” by its very own description)

THE patent troll Intellectual Ventures (IV) was covered here earlier this evening and last night we found this new article from Michael Loney, dressed up as an interview and sheltered behind a paywall. Dominion Harbor took patents from the world’s biggest troll (and Microsoft’s biggest troll) with the apparent intention is to become a troll, based on the following text:

Dominion Harbor has acquired Intellectual Ventures’ portfolio of Kodak patents. Its CEO, David Pridham, tells Michael Loney his plans for the portfolio and how he views the patent monetisation market

Intellectual property transaction and advisory firm Dominion Harbor has high hopes for its new purchase from Intellectual Ventures. In February it acquired more than 1,000 patent families in Kodak’s portfolio of patented technologies for an undisclosed sum.

This press release suggests that it happened just a few months ago, calling the buyer “an affiliate of Dominion Harbor Group, an integrated patent advisory and monetization firm.” That’s just a euphemism for patent troll. Expect a lot of ‘action’ from this troll. █

How long and how much more will it take for the Supreme Court to realise there is a profound issue in Texas?

Summary: The lack of justice in the American patent system, where trolls receive favourable treatment from particular judges and one bogus patent (now invalid) can earn a person over $45 million in ‘protection’ money, necessitates firm and decisive intervention from the US Supreme Court

Federal Circuit Once Again Overrules Mistakes by the Kangaroo Patent Court of Rodney Gilstrap in the Eastern District of Texas

Kangaroo courts are not monopolised by the EPO and the USPTO hasn’t a monopoly on bad patents, either (thankfully, the USPTO is actually improving and lowering the incentive for trolls). The US Supreme Court, together with CAFC below it, already do a fine job, further aided by PTAB (the appeals board) for quicker and cheaper determinations against bad patents.

“When Apple celebrates the death of bad patents we too are happy, even if we are far from friends of Apple (we used to call for boycotts).”“This ruling isn’t surprising,” one of the above articles states, “as US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap ordered a damages retrial, saying the jury’s view of Apple’s infringement might have been confused by his instructions on how properly to calculate royalties.”

But the pro-trolls Judge Rodney Gilstrap did not in fact dispute a liability. To him, it was just a matter of how much money would be paid. First to cover the news, as far as we were able to see, was Michael Loney of MIP. He wrote about it as early as yesterday, noting that CAFC had found yet another ruling from the notorious Eastern District of Texas to be bunk. “The Federal Circuit has found invalid three Smartflash patents,” he wrote, “reversing the Eastern District of Texas.”

Eolas Driven Out of the Eastern District of Texas

There is another important development down in Texas and Joe Mullin probably wrote the best report about it (Mullin is quite the expert in this domain). To quote Mullin:

Eolas Technologies, which has been called a “patent troll,” has continued to file against big companies, even after losing a landmark 2012 trial. But following an appeals court order (PDF) last week, Eolas will have to pursue its lawsuits in California—not its preferred patent hotspot of East Texas.

As of Friday, Eolas’ lawsuits against Google has been transferred to the Northern District of California. The move could reduce Eolas’ chances of winning a settlement or verdict since East Texas courts have been viewed by some as favoring patent holders. Similar lawsuits against Amazon and Wal-Mart remain in East Texas, for now.

Google’s request for a writ of mandamus to transfer a case brought by Eolas Technologies to the Northern District of California from the Eastern District of Texas has been granted, with the Federal Circuit citing “a clear abuse of discretion”

Eolas was mentioned here as far back as one decade ago and many more times since. It’s definitely a patent troll, but Mullin put the word “troll” (in the headline) and “patent troll” (in the body) within scare quotes, perhaps fearing legal action against the publisher (his employer).

Software patents, as in the above case, are bunk, but it’s very expensive (usually too expensive) going to court to show it (especially if there are appeals). This means that most defendants will silently fold and pay the Mafia (or troll) ‘protection’ money. Insistent and persistent aggressors or trolls, some of whom are well-funded, will just file more and more motions until the defendant — even if repeatedly deemed innocent — decides that it’s simply cheaper to settle. It means that wealth trumps justice and it can be exploited time after time, by simply choosing vulnerable litigation targets which are almost certainly going to buckle.

“Software patents, as in the above case, are bunk, but it’s very expensive (usually too expensive) going to court to show it (especially if there are appeals).”Speaking of software patents, this tweet says that “Salesforce tries to patent Records Management……quick take” (in an image).

Erich Spangenberg Turns Out to be a Patent ‘Fraud’

In the above cases we see deep-pocketed companies like Google and Apple fighting back, again and again, simply because they can afford it. So can smaller (but still very large companies) such as Newegg, which already spent millions of dollars on very few patent cases — and that’s just in legal fees!

According to Mullin’s other new report, mega-troll Erich Spangenberg went after Newegg and finally (belatedly) lost. That’s another software patent dead and we can expect more to come; it’s expensive to prove the invalidity. The USPTO should clean up this (its own) mess. PTAB helps towards that. Mullin wrote:

Patent-holding company TQP Development made millions claiming that it owned a breakthrough in Web encryption, even though most encryption experts had never heard of the company until it started a massive campaign of lawsuits. Yesterday, the company’s litigation campaign was brought to an end when a panel of appeals judges refused (PDF) to give TQP a second chance to collect on a jury verdict against Newegg.

The TQP patent was invented by Michael Jones, whose company Telequip briefly sold a kind of encrypted modem. The company sold about 30 models before the modem business went bust. Famed patent enforcer Erich Spangenberg bought the TQP patent in 2008 and began filing lawsuits, saying that the Jones patent actually entitled him to royalties on a basic form of SSL Internet encryption. Spangenberg and Jones ultimately made more than $45 million from the patent.

Will Spangenberg now refund the extortion money (more than $45 million), plus legal expenses? Or will this be another case of an invalid patent costing a fortune to countless companies, even though they were innocent all along because this patent was bogus?

We certainly hope that the Supreme Court is watching all these cases and will take them into account later this year when TC Heartland can become the new “patent killer” (precedent). █

By lawyers, for lawyers, but carefully and shrewdly disguised as news/journalism

Summary: China’s patent office, SIPO, maintains its misguided policy that software is patentable and India, which antagonises these policies in the face of a never-ending shaming campaign, comes under attack from IAM ‘magazine’ twice in a single week

SIPO is one of the world’s worst patent offices, if not the worst among prominent nations with a high-tech industry. We previously wrote about misguided new guidelines from SIPO and also used SIPO as an insult to the EPO, which seems eager to emulate SIPO’s mistakes. See the following posts for example:

SIPO examiners are now working against their national interest, for the appearance of “progress” (by artificially-inflated numbers). Trolls are already infesting China, which damages their economy. Sadly, over time, the same is becoming true in Europe and examiners from the EPO seem to be realising this. They didn’t join the EPO to get enlisted into an assembly line but in order to work like researchers who carefully study prior art — something akin to peer review.

“So they are promoting software patents under the guise of “clarity” — the same propaganda that is used in the US by lobbyist David Kappos and his large corporate clients, such as Microsoft and IBM.”A few months ago we noted that India and China were moving in opposite directions; India had created a massive software (development and services) industry, whereas China is known for making billions of devices, so India rejects software patents, whereas China adopts them to give the impression of ‘leadership’ (as measured with a Battistellite yardstick).

According to this new post, SIPO wants to become even more of a joke or an insult. On April 1st (an interesting choice of date) it will officially allow software patents, i.e. patents on mathematics… (what next? Patents on clean air and clean water?)

To quote:

In an effort to further enhance protection of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and to promote implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy, the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) of China has revised its Examination Guidelines for Patents, which will come into force as of April 1, 2017.

The revised Guidelines include the patent eligibility of computer softwareand business method, the acceptability of post-filing experimental data for chemistry inventions, the rules of claim amendments during patent invalidation procedures, and the availability of public access to patent documentations. Notably, the revisions may lift the long standing curbs on software patents.

Faiz ur Rahman, head of intellectual property for Wipro, pointed to the agency’s flip flop on software patents over the last couple of years as an egregious example. The patent office has issued guidelines for examining computer-related inventions in 2013, 2015 and 2016. While the 2015 rules seemed to move more in the direction of making software-related inventions patentable, the latest edition swung back in the opposite direction. For an IT services company like Wipro, that makes it very difficult to plot out a strategy for IP and innovation. “We need finality and quicker clarity over whether software is patentable in India”, Rahman said. “The uncertainty is really killing innovation”.

So they are promoting software patents under the guise of “clarity” — the same propaganda that is used in the US by lobbyist David Kappos and his large corporate clients, such as Microsoft and IBM. When is IAM officially recognised (and perhaps registered) as a lobbyist/think [sic] tank, e.g. of the EPO, USPTO maximaists, and the patent trolls? Just watch IAM's pattern on India alone… █

Summary: Patent wars in the broadcasting market and the role played by Microsoft and its largest patent troll, Intellectual Ventures, headed by Microsoft’s former CTO

THE CONNECTIONS between Intellectual Ventures (IV) and Rovi were covered here before, e.g. in [1, 2]. IV is the world’s largest patent troll, which covertly operates through thousands of shells and it is financially connected to Microsoft and Bill Gates. IV is a major threat to Free/libre software and GNU/Linux because, as we have shown here in the past, it also blackmails companies that manufacture and/or distribute BSD- and Linux-based devices.

TiVo is an infamous Linux-based device and also a company. It’s infamous because of what became known as “TiVoisation” (we covered it here repeatedly more than a decade ago) and all sorts of patent aspects which we covered half a decade ago (see our Wiki page about TiVo).

TiVo exploits Free software and Linux, but it’s hardly an ally or a friend. Now that Rovi has bought TiVo and considering “Rovi’s deal with Intellectual Ventures,” as IAM put it today, it’s hardly surprising that it’s followed by TiVo’s patents turning into shakedown or extortion. As IAM put it (obviously lauding and praising the aggressor):

Pre-dating last year’s merger was Rovi’s deal with Intellectual Ventures, where the two agreed to package together their IP relating to over-the-top (OTT) technology for Rovi to license. Since they announced that relationship, licensing deals have been unveiled with both Netflix and HBO. Armaly contends that it’s a model that can be replicated. The digital entertainment and OTT sectors weren’t necessarily high on IV’s list of licensing priorities, so last year’s agreement means that it can benefit from TiVo’s growing experience in the space and its technology offering.

Summary: Interference in politics and misinformation designed to mislead the public have both become a hallmark of the EPO under Battistelli, not just opportunistic legal firms which stand to benefit from the UPC (at everyone’s expense)

ADDITIONAL people are signing the petition against the UPC, but the vast majority of the public here in the UK still does not know what it is or what it is for (or who the UPC is really for). The EPO has gone as far as paying crates of money to publications in order to generate fake news [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] about the UPC, or to distort public perceptions. That’s just one among many abusive aspects of the EPO under Battistelli’s embarrassing ‘leadership’ (more like a reign of terror, in which even bloggers are being threatened).

“The EPO has gone as far as paying crates of money to publications in order to generate fake news about the UPC, or to distort public perceptions.”Dimitris Xenos wrote the other day [1, 2] that the “#unitarypatent is available to EUmember states only:‘this [ #UPC] Agreement should be open to accession by any Member State’ at 6 #Brexit [...] the term ‘member state(s)’ appears 127 times in the #UPC http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:42013A0620(01)&from=EN … #unitarypatent #Brexit”

According to this new post from IP Kat, there is an upcoming discussion about the issues associated with the UPC amid Brexit. To quote this short post:

This event is organised by the United Kingdom Association for European Law, and features three speakers who will be familiar to IPKat readers:

Dr Christopher Stothers, partner at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP
Dr Luke McDonagh, Lecturer in The City Law School at City, University of London
Prof Duncan Matthews, Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London

This is being discussed elsewhere too, according to this new tweet as far as India. It says that “Dr Jonathan Atkinson & Martyn Fish presenting on #Brexit and the #UPC at @CPhI_PharmaIPR 2017 in Mumbai #IP #Pharma” (there is also a photo in there).

Pharmaceutical giants must be drooling over the UPC, which would enable them to bankrupt/embargo/control their competition. Understandably, their lawyers too are cautiously excited and they try to hide their motivation. Consider this new interview with patent law firms that want litigation Armageddon (more profit to them):

In this video interview with LSIPR, McDonald explains that there are many good reasons why the UK should be part of the UPC and discusses the implications of Brexit.

What about those who don’t work for law firms? What about the more than 99% of the population, which would be subjected to the UPC if it ever became a reality?

Well, published earlier this week and found via David Pearce‏ (Tufty the Cat) was this article titled “Patent law: Theresa May’s new Brexit battlefield” — an article that cites Douglas Carswell and pro-Brexit media:

The only people who really care about patent law are patent holders, patent lawyers and patent academics. And yet Theresa May’s rash promise to remove the UK from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is about to turn this esoteric area into a major Brexit battleground. No matter how you approach it, there is no way to square what the government is doing on patents with its red line on the ECJ.

The fundamentalist fringe of the hard Brexit movement has started to notice too. A couple of weeks ago, Douglas Carswell put down an early day motion demanding a change on patent policy.

The Daily Express covered it with its usual restraint. “EXPOSED,” it said. “Secret plan to tie Britain to EU”. Ukip warned of a “stealth attempt” by ministers to carry out some sort of Brexit conspiracy.

Team UPC firms, e.g. Bristows in the UK, are still trying to effectively take over the law which governs them (like oil companies trying to write, by proxy, environmental regulations or telecommunication giants trying to remove limits on their operations). Watch this latest update from Bristows, an enemy of British democracy, working behind the curtains. “Unitary Software Patents like a letter through the post in Germany,” as Benjamin Henrion put it.

“Several days remain for concerned European citizens who can hopefully spare one minute to sign this petition.”If the UPC ever became a reality, a lot of small firms would receive a lot of letters through the post, not just from patent trolls that demand a lot of money but also from large competitors in other countries, threatening to take down small rivals all across Europe (one ruling, in one single city in Europe, affecting all “member states” in one fell swoop).

Several days remain for concerned European citizens who can hopefully spare one minute to sign this petition. █

Summary: An updated advice or guidance for sending documents and/or information to us without getting caught by prying eyes, not even if we are legally threatened by an out-of-control institution that bends the law

Some people requested further clarifications and some people have suggested improvements to the article since it was first published, as better options became available (not that our advice was altogether bad, just suboptimal or deficient). “Please help,” one person wrote to us. “I saw your article “How to Securely Provide Techrights With Information, Documents”. Could you please clarify the following in a future article?”

“We never got caught publishing anything fake, which means we have a 100% accuracy record, as far as source material goes.”The main amendments suggested to us were the sorts of sites/services to use for increased anonymity/privacy/security. These sites, as one might expect, are not well known or even mainstream. Some people wish to send images, some send plain text, some send rich text, and some send documents, scans of documents, or photographs (if not screenshots) of documents. We generally think that photographs of things are less likely to leave legible watermarks (like kerning signatures) and the same goes for plain text, so it’s probably safe to reduce everything down to images and plain text. We prefer not to know where these are coming from, even if we can manually remove personally-identifying metadata. It makes both us and our sources safer when neither side has identity information. Put bluntly, we typically prefer not to know where material comes from; we just need to know that it’s verifiable (given context and/or accompanying explanation) and then we can cross-check to ensure its authenticity. We never got caught publishing anything fake, which means we have a 100% accuracy record, as far as source material goes. We do check everything carefully before publication. We don’t wish to get tricked into publishing fake material as that would be self-discrediting and it’s a commonly-used tactic for muddying the water or poisoning the well.

“I am unsure whether it is safe to send you a .pdf document,” a person told us anonymously, “including text only.”

We don’t really need the original PDFs if there is enough to verify by; PDFs are of a clunky format type that tends to migrate with it all sorts of signatures and it drips metadata. If people can upload an image somewhere on the Web (preferably not through service such as Google’s, as they have a poor record on anonymity) and then send us a link, that ought to be enough. Remailers can be used to send us anonymous messages (or links) and we can typically cope with the input without having to even reply to the source.

“We do check everything carefully before publication.”“Anonmgur does no longer exist,” we were told, “but Anonmgur now refers to anonimag.es as an alternative. I’ve tried anonimag.es, several times, but it does not work properly.”

We got into some discussions last year about which image and text ‘bins’ are best or safest for preserving anonymity (even at the face of legal threats, which are rendered useless if logs are purged permanently). If we recommend one particular service (there are many), it will enable the surveillance lackeys at EPO to latch onto particular domains, so we prefer not to suggest just one particular service. Diversity breeds safety here.

“Thanks for updating or amending your article “How to Securely Provide Techrights With Information, Documents” so that thing become clearer for me and others,” we were told, but we decided to lay things out again, rather than modify the previous article (we rarely edit old articles, except just hours after publication).

“If we recommend one particular service (there are many), it will enable the surveillance lackeys at EPO to latch onto particular domains, so we prefer not to suggest just one particular service.”To date, the most damaging EPO leak was probably this one. It generated a lot of media coverage and caused a great stir among EPO stakeholders, who rightly felt like they had been discriminated against.

Today or last night Research and Markets published details about an upcoming one-day seminar with tips for EPO applications and another for advanced drafting. We could not help joking about it because in today’s EPO it seems like anyone can just pay under the table or lobby for preferential treatment. We are certain that many examiners have come across examples of that and we hope for more leaks to that effect.

“Like any publication out there, we strive to have impact, as do our sources.”Regarding the timing of disclosure, it’s not always immediate (upon receiving material) because we need to verify authenticity, we need to wait for relevant development/news, and sometimes there are two connected stories that we investigate at the same time and they can be fused together. Like any publication out there, we strive to have impact, as do our sources. So if we don’t release something promptly, then there is probably a reason behind it. We rarely post teasers (quite rarely we do, for a change) because the element of surprise enables us to catch the EPO’s management, for example, unprepared and unable to properly respond, distract, or undermine publication (as attempted in the past). █

Contents

Server

In recent years, however, we’ve seen an explosion of new developments in software; each intended to achieve the above-stated goal. The current nexus of software development, also referred to as ‘Cloud Native Computing’ does just that and lies at the intersection of containers, microservices, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Deployment and the modern cloud.

Lennart Poettering is announcing today, March 1, 2017, the general availability of the systemd 233 init system for Linux-based operating systems that have adopted the open-source technology.

systemd 233 comes four months after the release of the previous version, namely systemd 232, and it’s a major update that adds over 70 improvements and bug fixes, as well as some new features. First of, it looks like all the Python scripts that ship with systemd now require Python 3 to be installed on your GNU/Linux distribution.

With the rapid growth of virtualized infrastructure and containerization, open source software and especially Linux are leading the way into a new era of software development. That was the message Al Gillen, vice president of the software and open source group at IDC, told the crowd at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe in February. In his talk, Gillen charted the growth of Linux and other open source initiatives from 2001 to the present. The picture his data painted was a positive one for the open source community.

“The future is all about open source, and we see very much open source becoming the standardization layer that enables everything else we do in the industry,” Gillen said.

The just released version 17.02 of the Genode OS framework comes with greatly enhanced virtual file-system capabilities, eases the creation of dynamic system compositions, and adds a new facility for processing user input. Furthermore, the components have become binary-compatible across kernel boundaries by default such that entire system scenarios can be moved from one kernel to another without recompiling the components.

Genode’s virtual file-system (VFS) infrastructure has a twisted history. Originally created as a necessity for enabling command-line-based GNU programs to run within Genode’s custom Unix runtime, the VFS was later extracted as a separate library. This library eventually became an optional and later intrinsic part of Genode’s C runtime. It also happened to become the basis of a file-system-server component. If this sounds a bit confusing, it probably is. But the resulting design takes the notion of virtual file systems to an new level.

Collabora’s Emil Velikov announced today the immediate availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) development version of the upcoming Mesa 17.0.1 3D Graphics Library, which will be the first point release to the Mesa 17.0 series.

Mesa 17.0.1 promises to be a hefty maintenance update that addresses approximately 70 issues discovered since last month’s release of Mesa 17.0.0. Fixes have been implemented across all of the supported open-source drivers, including but not limited to RadeonSI, Gallium, Intel i965, Nouveau, Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan ones.

Benchmarks

The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here: AMD Zen (Ryzen) processors are shipping! Thanks to AMD coming around at the last minute, I received a Ryzen 7 1800X yesterday evening and have been putting it through its paces. Here is my walkthrough of the Linux experience for the AMD Ryzen and new motherboard and a number of the initial Linux benchmarks for this high-end Zen CPU while much more coverage is coming in the hours and days ahead.

Applications

When you rescue your data from a dying hard drive, time is of the essence. The longer it takes to copy your data, the more you risk losing. GNU ddrescue is the premium tool for copying dying hard drives, and any block device such as CDs, DVDs, USB sticks, Compact Flash, SD cards — anything that is recognized by your Linux system as /dev/foo. You can even copy Windows and Mac OS X storage devices because GNU ddrescue operates at the block level, rather than the filesystem level, so it doesn’t matter what filesystem is on the device.

Proprietary

LCPSoft has announced the release of a new product: JRecoverer for Linux Passwords 1.1.0. The program imports hashes of user passwords of various Linux distributors from a shadow file from a local computer or a remote computer using an SSH protocol, restoring original passwords using one of three methods.

The cornerstone of system security and user data protection is password security. In the Linux operating system, user passwords are stored not in an open format, but as hashes. If a user only knows the hash, he cannot restore the original password. It can, however, be matched, although this recovery method takes significantly longer.

Microsoft announced that Skype 5.0 for Linux has entered Beta stages of development after being in Alpha for more than eight months, during which it received numerous builds that users were able to take for a test drive.

As you can see, not only that status of the application was changed from Alpha to Beta, which means that it should be more stable and reliable, but also the version number. Skype’s version scheme was bumped to build 5.0 from 1.x, showing Microsoft’s commitment to offer Linux users a modern VoIP client that’s feature rich and on par with the Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows builds.

Few debate that the destiny of a hosting infrastructure is running applications across multiple containers. Containers are a genuinely fantastic, highly performant technology ideal for deploying software updates to applications. Whether you’re working in an enterprise with a number of critical microservices, tightly coupled with a pipeline that continuously deploys your latest software, or you’re running a single LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MySQL, PHP) website that sometimes needs to scale up for busy periods, containers can provide with relative ease the software dependencies you need across all stages of your development life cycle.

At the same time, you can also access all the Linux utilities, whether it’s sshing into your server or using applications like GIMP and LibreOffice. To be honest, I do most of my consumer side work in Chrome OS; it has almost all commercial and popular apps and services. Whether I want to watch Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, or Amazon Prime, I can do this on the same machine where I can also use core Linux utilities and manage my servers easily.

Interested in producing your own podcast or video series entirely from a free software-fueled, Linux-powered computer? Here’s how I accomplish that task.

Feel free to copy my exact setup for your own use. Or take some of my recommendations. Or ignore everything I say here and do things better than I do. Either way, hopefully this proves useful in your Linux-fueled media production endeavors.

Games

Feral Interactive have announced that not one but TWO new DLC packs are now available for Total War: Warhammer on Linux. These new DLCs provide players the opportunity to try out new armies, new Legendary Lords and new magical abilities. Watch the two trailers below to see what is coming to the old world…

Feral Interactive, the UK-based games publisher know for porting AAA titles like Life Is Strange, Mad Max, Tomb Raider (2013), and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to Linux and Mac platforms, just announce the availability of the DiRT Rally racing game for Linux.

If you’ve been waiting to play the most acclaimed, thrilling and authentic rally racing simulation game developed and published by Codemasters on your Linux gaming rig, now you can. DiRT Rally is available for purchase on Steam for Linux, as well as on Valve’s SteamOS gaming platform for Steam Machines, or directly from Feral Interactive’s online store.

DiRT Rally is the latest game from Feral Interactive that has launch-day open-source AMD graphics support, a welcome improvement from the past. Thanks to the ever maturing state of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and Feral’s increased Radeon testing, there is good out-of-the-box Radeon support for this AAA racing game on Linux.

Just weeks after bringing HITMAN to Linux, Feral Interactive this morning has released another high profile game ported from Windows: DiRT Rally. DiRT Rally is now available for Linux gamers interested in a fun racing game. I’ve been benchmarking their Linux port the past few days and have both Radeon Gallium3D benchmarks and NVIDIA results to share for launch-day. Here are fourteen NVIDIA GPUs tested with DiRT Rally on Ubuntu Linux.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

GNOME 3.24 will be out in a few weeks and with it will come Games 3.24. This new version will offer a few new features and many refinements, some of which have been implemented by new contributors theawless and Radhika Dua, kudos to them!

As mentioned in my previous post, I’ll be posting regularly with an update on what I’ve been up to as the GNOME Executive Director, and highlighting some cool stuff around the project!

[...]

A fairly lengthy and wide-ranging interview with myself has been published at cio.com. It covers a bit of my background (although mistakenly says I worked for Collabora Productivity, rather than Collabora Limited!), and looks at a few different areas on where I see GNOME and how it sits within the greater GNU/Linux movement – I cover “some uncomfortable subjects around desktop Linux”. It’s well worth a read.

The release cycle of the GTK+ 3.22 toolkit is nowhere near the end of life, and a new point release appeared on the official FTP servers of the GNOME Project, versioned 3.22.9.

GTK+ 3.22.9 has been released at the end of February two weeks after the launch of the eighth maintenance update to the GTK+ 3.22 stable series, which is targeted to users of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment. GTK+ 3.22.9 is a modest update that adds a bunch of bug fixes and improvements for Wayland support, as well as HiDPI.

The GNOME developers are currently preparing to unleash the second and last Beta milestone for the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, due for release on March 22, 2017.

Therefore, we can’t help but notice that many of the core components and applications from the GNOME 3.24 Stack have been updated lately, including the Epiphany web browser, which was bumped to version 3.23.91 (3.24 Beta 2).

Quite a bunch of improvements and some new features have been added in this second Beta release of Epiphany 3.24, among which we can mention the implementation of a new search engine dialog, along with support for search engine bangs.

Arch Family

It’s the first day of March, which means that Arch Linux users can get their hands on a brand-new install medium of the well-known GNU/Linux distribution with all the latest software updates and security patches.

Whenever we talk about Linux Kali alternatives, we often end up talking about Parrot OS. But, there’s another great option that’s based on Arch Linux. Yes, I’m talking about BlackArch Linux. I keep tracking its releases regularly, and today I’ll tell you about the freshly baked BlackArch Linux 2017-03-01.

Red Hat Family

Red Hat has made available the latest version of its enterprise-grade, automation platform, Ansible Tower 3.1.

The Ansible Tower platform enables enterprises to get through all complexities of modern IT environments with the use of powerful automation capabilities that can improve productivity and also reduce downtime.

Fedora

And this is also our approach for Flatpak which for us forms a crucial tandem with Wayland and the future of the Linux desktop. To ensure the project is managed in a way that is open and transparent to all and allows for different groups to adapt it to their specific usecases. And so far it is looking good, with early adoption and trials from the IVI community, traditional Linux distributions, device makers like Endless and platforms such as Steam. Each of these using the technologies or looking to use them in slightly different ways, but still all collaborating on pushing the shared technologies forward.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

I am impressed with the Zorin OS 12.1 release. Zorin OS is not the same old GNOME distro retread. It has a well integrated and tweaked user interface that justifies the developer’s moniker of “Zorin Desktop 2.”

Zorin OS 12.1 is an ideal choice for large deployments in businesses, governments, schools and organizations. A key reason for its business and government suitability is the new release schedule. Major releases of Zorin OS happen only once every two years. Minor updates like version 12.1 come every few months as needed.

Users will be spared major disruptions without feeling that their operating system is aging or abandoned. The result is an efficient and healthy balance.

If you miss the era of the keyboard personal digital assistant (PDA) – that is, that strange animal that is trapped in the middle of being a netbook and a smartphone – you might be one of a few. But then again, there was so much to the PDAs in that time – from your Nokia E90 Communicator, to the Dell Axim PDAs, and the HTC Wizard devices. So London-based Planet Computers is bringing the PDA back with the Gemini – an Android-powered PDA with a keyboard and network connectivity like a modern smartphone.

Phones

Mobile World Congress – the showcase of the most cutting-edge technology on the planet – is in full swing in Barcelona this week. Phones, wearables and everything else with a microchip is showing off fantastic new features. But all anyone really seems interested in is a remake of a phone from 17 years ago, the Nokia 3310.

There are a few ways to look at the Nokia 3310. It could just be a marketing ploy, or a Hollywood-esque remake because the industry has run out of ideas. Or maybe it’s trying to tap into the feeling that modern life is too connected, harking back to a simpler time. But whatever you think the Nokia 3310 is, it tells us something interesting about the state of the smartphone industry in 2017.

“It’s an absolutely damning indictment of the state of the smartphone market that the world is so excited and obsessed with a retro feature phone that shipped 17 years ago,” said Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight.

Tizen

All Tizen phones have only one antivirus security app which is made by Intel named McAfee Security. Kaspersky Lab, who has been a long time Tizen partner, announced their security solution for Tizen based IoT devices; but this is not a solution for smartphones.

Today, an app developer Gagandeep Singh, has added a new antivirus security app named G Antivirus to the Tizen Store. As the name suggests the security app will scan your files for any potential virus.

Last month, a Twitter app client was added to the Tizen Store by KDF named ‘Client for Twitter’. Today, another Twitter client for Tizen smartphones has been added by app developer Kamil Nimisz, named Wings for Twitter. First impressions are that this is a good Twitter app for you to use on your Tizen smartphone. Very simple, easy to use, fast, secure, and synced across all devices etc. aNother great feature of this app is the ability to support multiple twitter accounts.

Samsung video player, VLC player and MX player (Using ACL Technology) are already 3 of the best video player apps available in the Tizen store as of today. Now, another developer has added a new video player app named Hound Player (previously doMovie) by Victor Sindee with lots of exciting features.

Android

Last week Jide made an announcement that had a familiar message. Following the likes of Microsoft Continuum and Ubuntu Convergence, its Remix Singularity project wanted to turn the very same Android smartphone and apps that you keep in your pocket into the PC that you’ll use on your desktop. Jide is hardly the first nor the only one who has made such an attempt. At MWC 2017, French company Auxens has revealed an alpha version of its OXI ROM that does that as well, with a little less polish but a bit more device support.

OnePlus has been releasing updates for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T quite often since their release, but if you want to get a taste of their latest offerings before the global OTA roll-out, then you can participate in the OxygenOS Open Beta program for your device. Now, OnePlus has announced that their latest Open Beta update built on Android 7.1.1 for the OnePlus 3 and OnePlus 3T is rolling out.

In case you forgot, Nokia’s new 6, 5 and 3 aren’t actually the company’s first Android devices. Many years ago, it made a mistake the Nokia X. It wasn’t really aimed at western markets and (if you ever got to play with one), it wasn’t really all that good. Fortunately, this second attempt demonstrates that the company’s far more serious with Android, with a classy Scandinavian design notes and an unobtrusive (and importantly up to date) mobile operating system. All the devices clock in at under $250, too, which means Nokia’s taking aim at the mid-range smartphone heartland. The company has learned fast.

After the iPhone and Android devices entered the smartphone scene, they changed the entire industry. The formerly-dominant companies in this space – RIM, Nokia, and Palm to name a few – couldn’t catch up fast enough. Nokia, which was the giant to beat at the time, quickly found itself bleeding and struggling to maintain its once dominant market share before Microsoft bought its mobile devices division.

So why are we now seeing Nokia-branded phones in 2017, years after Nokia seemingly left the competitive smartphone marketplace? The answer lies in a somewhat-complicated history of poor choices, acquisitions, and licensing deals.

Mobile World Congress is the world’s biggest cell phone trade show, and it’s Android phone makers’ biggest show as well. While Google has its own Google I/O conference, that’s typically where Google shows off Android software. You want hardware? You go to MWC.

Android was first demoed at MWC ten shows ago, back in 2008. Let’s see how the now dominant mobile OS has changed as it enters its tenth year in Barcelona.

There comes a time in your life when you have to share one or more files with someone, whether that someone is a friend, a family member, a colleague or collaborator, or a client. Many people stay true to their open source convictions by doing the job using applications like ownCloud, Nextcloud, or SparkleShare.

All three are solid and flexible, but they’re not the only games in town. Maybe your needs lean towards a simpler application. Or maybe you just want a dedicated file sharing tool that puts the power and the data in your hands.

You have a number of open source options which give you all of that and more. Let’s look at four additional open source tools that can meet all of your file sharing needs.

Hyperboria is an end-to-end encrypted mesh network that uses IPv6. The focus of Hyperboria is to create a large-scale neutral network with a security as a first priority. The technology uses CJDNS (no relation to DNS) for Layer 3 routing and employs a novel public key cryptosystem to establish connections and encrypt traffic. Austin, Texas currently boasts the largest segment of Hyperboria with a network size of around 500 nodes. Unlike most traditional networks, and similar to Bitcoin, it uses a public key as an address that data can be sent to.

Many think the development of technology is reserved only for the super-intelligent, and that the average person cannot comprehend it.

This particular view of technology is a product of a closed-type environment, which hides key information related to the development of technology behind patents, copyrights and trademarks. While it’s debatable how intellectual property rights of inventors must be saved from abuse, traditional modes of doing so can block the flow of information in society.

This model is primarily driven by commercial interests— where key technological inventions sell at very high prices. But this model increases the divide between the ‘privileged’ class and the ‘under-privileged’ class. The division of the world between developed, developing and under-developed nations is primarily based on the level of technology they possess. This leads to prohibitively expensive technology and an increasing technological divide— we are producing a generation of technology users instead of technology developers.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which itself is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, is expanding its roster of supported projects today with the addition of the gRPC project.

The gRPC project is an open source, high performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework originally developed by Google. The gRPC project has already been used outside of Google, with CoreOS and Netflix among the technology’s adopters.

“A lot of people are a little shocked and confused to hear about how EMC is contributing to and supporting open source development,” Joshua Bernstein said to open his keynote address at last year’s MesosCon conference in Denver. “I think that while many of us already understand the benefit of that, convincing large companies to do this sort of thing is a challenge.”

Berstein became Dell EMC’s vice president of technology in 2015, after a four year stint as manager of Siri development and architecture at Apple. At MesosCon, he talked about some of the things that DevOps should consider when deciding whether to deploy open source or proprietary solutions.

What are the newest frontiers that open source software is conquering? Black Duck’s latest open source “Rookies of the Year” report, which highlights areas like blockchain and SDN, provides some interesting insights.

The report, which Black Duck published Monday, highlights what the company calls “the top new open source projects initiated in 2016.” It’s the ninth annual report of this type that Black Duck has issued.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

UK firm OnePoint Global is making the source code for its mobile survey platform available on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, allowing clients to build their own survey solutions, integrate survey modules into their existing platforms, or take a ‘white label’ approach.

BSD

A man-in-the-middle vulnerability has been found in OpenBSD’s wireless stack. A malicious access point can trick an OpenBSD client using WPA1 or WPA2 into connecting to this malicious AP instead of the desired AP. When this attack is used successfully the OpenBSD client will send and accept unencrypted frames.

Public Services/Government

The UK government finally published its Digital Strategy today, outlining its plans for making the country a global capital of the digital economy.

Culture Secretary Karen Bradley MP launched the strategy by laying out the government’s vision of how to develop the requisite infrastructure, regulations and skills to make the UK the ideal place for digital businesses, new technology and advanced research.

“The Digital Strategy will help to create a world-leading digital economy that works for everyone,” she pledged at the Entrepreneur First startup accelerator. The London incubator is housed in a converted Biscuit Factory, a fitting example of the digital transformation the plans intend to support.

Licensing/Legal

Communication is one of the seven essential elements to ensure the success of open source license compliance activities. And it’s not enough to communicate compliance policies and processes with executive leadership, managers, engineers, and other employees. Companies must also develop external messaging for the developer communities of the open source projects they use in their products.

Github recently drafted an update to their Terms Of Service. The new TOS is potentially very bad for copylefted Free Software. It potentially neuters it entirely, so GPL licensed software hosted on Github has an implicit BSD-like license. I’ll leave the full analysis to the lawyers, but see Thorsten’s analysis.

I contacted Github about this weeks ago, and received only an anodyne response. The Free Software Foundation was also talking with them about it. It seems that Github doesn’t care or has some reason to want to effectively neuter copyleft software licenses.

Open Data

The United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service (GDS) will host the first Government Data Science Conference, in London, on 24 April. “The conference is an opportunity to connect communities interested in the better use of data in government including data scientists, analysts and policymakers”, GDS writes on its site.

Open Hardware/Modding

Developers makers and hobbyists that are looking for a quick way to prototype electronic projects may be interested in an open source modular prototyping toolkit which has been created by M5Stack, based in San Francisco.

Watch the demonstration video below to learn how the M5Stack prototyping toolkit can help you transform your ideas into working prototypes using a wide variety of different modules.

Good news for anyone in the Øresund region this summer: a new route between Sweden and Denmark is set to open, as a ferry designed to carry cyclists between the two bike-mad nations is trialled during the warmer months.

The ferry will run across the Øresund strait between Dragør near Copenhagen to Limhamn, west of Malmö city centre.

Dragør’s municipal council last week gave the green light to allow a shipping company to run the pilot project, which will ferry cyclists across the strait in the historic M/S Elephanten, a converted shipping boat built in 1940. It will hold 36 passengers, with the journey taking about one hour to complete.

Microsoft is adding Google Calendar and Contacts support to the Mac version of Outlook 2016, the company announced yesterday. The change means that Outlook users will be able to synchronize and track their Google Calendars across a range of devices, from Mac, to Android phone, to Windows PC.

Science

Two recent publications suggest that life, in the form of ancient, simple organisms called methanogens, could survive the harsh conditions found near the surface of Mars, and deep in its soils. Using methanogens to test for survivability is particularly relevant because scientists have detected their byproduct, methane, in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, methane is strongly associated with organic matter, though there are non-organic sources of the gas, including volcanic eruptions.

Health/Nutrition

After weeks of meetings aimed at extending state-provided water relief credits, residents of Flint, Michigan, will resume paying the full price for water they still need to filter and have not been able to drink safely since April 2014.

The credits, totaling roughly $40 million in aid, have covered 65 percent of residents’ water usage since 2014 when the city’s water crisis began. The credits have also covered 20 percent of city businesses’ water use.

The dangers of Flint’s water drew national attention after an emergency manager answering to the state’s governor, Rick Snyder, ordered the city’s utility to switch water providers from Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water to the Flint River. The move filled the city’s water pipes and residents’ taps with water contaminated by high levels of lead.

Security

More than 1 million websites running the WordPress content management system may be vulnerable to hacks that allow visitors to snatch password data and secret keys out of databases, at least under certain conditions.

The vulnerability stems from a “severe” SQL injection bug in NextGEN Gallery, a WordPress plugin with more than 1 million installations. Until the flaw was recently fixed, NextGEN Gallery allowed input from untrusted visitors to be included in WordPress-prepared SQL queries. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit the weakness to pipe powerful commands to a Web server’s backend database.

Botnets have existed for at least a decade. As early as 2000, hackers were breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. Among other things, the hackers used the combined computing power of these botnets to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, which flood websites with traffic to take them down.

But now the problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video recorders, and other gadgets in the “Internet of things.” Because these devices typically have little or no security, hackers can take them over with little effort. And that makes it easier than ever to build huge botnets that take down much more than one site at a time.

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer will lose her annual bonus and the company’s top lawyer has been removed over their mishandling of security breaches that exposed the personal information of more than 1 billion users.

Mayer’s cash bonus is worth about $2m a year and her personal cost from the security flaws increased when the board also accepted her offer to relinquish an annual stock award worth millions of dollars.

Mayer, whose management team was found by an internal review to have reacted too slowly to one breach in 2014, said on Wednesday she wanted the board to distribute her bonus to Yahoo’s entire workforce of 8,500 employees. The board did not say if it would do so.

A few days ago I ordered a small batch of the ChaosKey, a small USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level, drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.

Many people don’t realize much of the Internet is built on free software. Even giant companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon rely extensively on big libraries of code—known as “open source” software”—written by thousands of programmers, who share their work with everyone.

But no software is perfect. Like the proprietary code developed by many companies, open source software contains flaws that hackers can exploit to steal information or spread viruses. That’s why a new initiative to patch those holes is important.

A year ago, several Google engineers got together and lay the foundation of Operation Rosehub, a project during which Google employees used some of their official work time to patch thousands of open source projects against a severe and widespread Java vulnerability.

Known internally at Google as the Mad Gadget vulnerability, the issue was discovered at the start of 2015 but came to everyone’s attention in November 2015 after security researchers from Foxglove Security showcased how it could be used to steal data from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Jenkins, and OpenNMS Java applications.

Defence/Aggression

The New Yorker is aggressively touting its 13,000-word cover story on Russia and Trump that was bylined by three writers, including the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick. Beginning with its cover image menacingly featuring Putin, Trump and the magazine’s title in Cyrillic letters, along with its lead cartoon dystopically depicting a UFO-like Red Square hovering over and phallically invading the White House, a large bulk of the article is devoted to what has now become standard – and very profitable – fare among East Coast news magazines: feeding Democrats the often-xenophobic, hysterical Russia-phobia for which they have a seemingly insatiable craving. Democratic media outlets have thus predictably cheered this opus for exposing “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence on the presidential election.”

Sweden has voted to reintroduce military conscription by 1 July after struggling to fill army ranks on a voluntary basis, citing increased Russian military activity in the Baltics as one of the reasons for the policy U-turn.

In 2010, Sweden’s centre-right government of the time abolished the draft after more than 100 years, arguing that targeted recruitment would increase the quality of a military that had shrunk by more than 90% since the end of the cold war.

But with unemployment rates having returned to pre-2008 levels, the country has been struggling to meet its target of 4,000 new recruits per annum.

Canadian armed forces are barely enough to hold a single town together, let alone to fight a war. That’s not good enough. We should ramp up bodies, especially shooters, by at least a factor of five and we should procure vehicles and weapon-system in numbers sufficient for a general mobilization. Modern warfare is not like WWII where we had years to get ready. Things can get really bad in days with ICBMs, suicide bombers, chemical/biological weapons and many thousands of really insane people possessing them with evil intent. Conscription is fine to mobilize a population but we probably don’t need that if our reserves are much larger and our weapon-sytems more capable. We should aim to recruit ~10% of the population for military training and have 1% of the population ready to go instantly. That would give us flexibility similar to other countries who recognize the dangers around the world.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

A federal judge said Tuesday that he’ll decide within a week whether to temporarily halt construction of the final section of the Dakota Access pipeline over claims that it violates the religious rights of two Indian tribes.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg told lawyers at a hearing that he wants to issue a ruling before oil begins flowing in the pipeline, which could be weeks away.

By the end of the century up to 70 percent of snow cover in the Alps will have melted and the ski season will be much shorter, Swiss researchers predict.

If global warming is not halted, only ski areas above 2,500 metres will have enough snow for winter sports, said the scientists from the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) and the EPFL Lausanne.

Writing in European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal The Cryosphere, they predicted that the amount and duration of snow cover in typical Alpine areas would have shrunk by the end of the century, even in best-case climate scenarios.

Finance

It took eight years and at least as many back-to-back-to-back-to-back controversies to break Travis Kalanick.

After a stunning month of scandals at Uber, Kalanick, its founder and CEO, sent an emotional and uncharacteristically apologetic memo to his employees Tuesday night. “This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help,” Kalanick wrote. “And I intend to get it.”

Censorship/Free Speech

“German-Turkey relations are facing one of their greatest challenges of the modern era,” German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said, a day after a German-Turkish journalist was formally charged in Turkey with producing terrorist propaganda and undermining the government.

The detention of Deniz Yucel, who works for German newspaper Die Welt, has led to an outpouring of anger and frustration from German politicians and media figureheads alike.

Some politicians have even called into question whether future visits to Germany by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of an upcoming election campaign should be allowed to go ahead.

The copyright industry is trying – again – to forcefully conscript Internet Service Providers into doing their bidding. This time, the RIAA and other organizations are demanding “filtering”, which is a pretty word for censorship, of anything they don’t want people to send to each other privately.

Ask yourself this one question: is it any shade of reasonable that a private industry gets a governmental mandate to silence our phonecalls when we talk about things that the private industry in question don’t want us to talk about? Because that’s exactly what the copyright industry is demanding here, exactly what they’re demanding, as applied to the Internet.

Twitter is cracking down even harder against trolls, including temporarily barring accounts that are harassing other users.

In a blog posted Wednesday, Twitter’s vice president of engineering, Ed Ho, announced more safety measures to stop abuse on its platform.

One of the methods includes using the company’s internal algorithms to identify problematic accounts and limiting certain account functions — such as only allowing the aggressor to see their followers — for a set period of time if they engaged in troublesome behavior.

SOCIAL NETWORK Twitter has announced that it’s making more updates to its service that will help to silence trolls and better allow users to filter out abusive content.

Last month, Twitter announced a ‘three-step plan’ to tackle trolls, which included an easier way for user filter “abusive and low-quality replies” from users’ timelines by default, a ban on suspended users from creating new accounts, and a new ‘safe search’ feature which the firm claims will remove offensive tweets – along with tweets from blocked and muted accounts – from a users timeline.

On Wednesday, the firm announced it’s expanding on these efforts, and will now look to algorithms to more actively identify accounts that spread abusive content.

Longtime Plymouth City Clerk Linda Langmesser is the subject of an internal investigation after an anti-Muslim post she made on Facebook came to light, City Manager Paul Sincock confirmed Tuesday.

“It’s a matter of an internal investigation,” Sincock said. “We have no further comment.”

According to Sincock, Langmesser’s posting was a response to a story about a Muslim woman who’d lost her job at the White House; the story, headlined “I was a Muslim in Trump’s White House for 8 Days,” penned for The Atlantic by former White House staffer Rumana Ahmed, who hired into the White House during President Obama’s first term.

According to Sincock, Langmesser’s post — which has since been removed — talked about how Ahmed wasn’t telling the truth “because that’s what they do in their culture” and that she should “be sent back to where she can worship the koran.”

On 24 February 2017 the Rapporteur of the European Parliament (EP) Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO), Catherine Stihler MEP, published her draft Opinion on the Copyright Directive. The Opinion sends a strong message against the most extremist parts of the European Commission’s proposal: the “censorship machine” (aka upload filter) proposal in Article 13 and the suggestion to expand the “ancillary copyright ” (aka “link tax”), that failed so miserably in Germany and Spain to every country of the EU.

If you dare to walk onto a university campus, you better prepare yourself. Flags bearing the stern face of Lenin drape from windows. Reincarnated soldiers of the Red Army patrol the corridors. The harmonic chime of ‘The Red Flag’ hangs in the air.

Yes, according to a ground-breaking study by the Adam Smith Institute, eight out of ten UK universities are ‘left-wing’.

Privacy/Surveillance

Netzpolitik — once on the receiving end of treason charges for reporting on leaked documents — is marking the end of the so-called “inquiry” into the BND-NSA partnership with a post discussing the inquiry’s multiple failures. The German government’s investigation into Five Eyes spy efforts was a direct result of leaked Snowden documents, which showed the NSA had spied on the German chancellor.

It failed to uncover much about that particular allegation. By the time this part of the investigation had been dropped, President Obama had already apologized for the NSA doing perfectly normal NSA-type stuff: spying on foreign officials. The committee turned to a broader discussion of surveillance best practices, including the propriety of spying on friends and neighbors. In doing so, it uncovered plenty of illicit and ill-advised spying by its NSA equivalent, BND.

Nearly three years have passed since Google announced it would offer an end-to-end encryption add-on for Gmail, a potentially massive shift in the privacy options of a piece of software used by more than a billion people. It still hasn’t materialized. And while Google insists its encryption plugin isn’t vaporware, the company’s latest move has left critics with the distinct impression that Gmail’s end-to-end encrypted future looks cloudy at best—if not altogether evaporated.

Last Friday, Google quietly announced that E2EMail, an extension for Chrome that would seamlessly encrypt and decrypt Gmail messages, was no longer a Google effort. Instead, the company has invited the outside developer community to adopt the project’s open-source code. Google was careful to emphasize in a blog post describing the change that it hasn’t given up work on its email encryption tool. But cryptographers and members of the privacy community see the move as confirmation that Google has officially backburnered a critical privacy and security initiative.

The European Commission wants to obligate internet platforms to monitor all content their users upload for copyright infringements. This is laid out in Article 13 of Günther Oettinger’s copyright overhaul plans.

I’ve detailed the harmful effects such upload surveillance would have in my previous post 10 things on the web the EU Commission wants to make illegal: Points 6 to 8 as well as the final one would be consequences to this particular part of the copyright plans.

AOL announced today that it is starting to cut off third-party app access to its Instant Messenger service. As first noticed by ArsTechnica, AOL began notifying users of at least one third-party app, Adium, that it would become obsolete starting on March 28th.

At this point, it’s unclear whether or not all third-party applications will be rendered useless come March 28th, but the message presented to Adium users seemed to strongly imply that:

Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (50 U.S.C. § 1881a) grew out of a secret George W. Bush-era warrantless surveillance program that monitored the international communications of people in the US. It currently underpins some of the most sweeping warrantless NSA surveillance programs that affect Americans and people across the globe.

Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, envisions a future in which the government outsources the development of its cyber weapons to the private sector.

Rogers said Friday at an event co-sponsored by AFCEA International and the U.S. Naval Institute that he questions whether developing all cyber weapons within government is sustainable. The alternative, which Rogers said could be a reality within the next five to 10 years, would be for Cyber Command to tell companies exactly what type of weapon the agency needed to be built and allow the companies to manufacture it.

Civil Rights/Policing

A youth who attacked blogger Amos Yee at a Jurong West mall in May last year was ordered to undergo nine months of probation on Wednesday (March 1).

Bryon Loke Thong Ler, 19, who had confronted the 17-year-old for taking a video of him at Jurong Point, was also ordered to complete 100 hours of community service. Loke’s parents, who were in court, placed a $5,000 bond to ensure his compliance.

Loke had earlier pleaded guilty to using criminal force on Amos between noon and 12.50pm on May 29 last year. The court had called for a probation report.

On the other hand, lower-level uses of force have increased 23.5% over the same period. What could be taken as an indication of a partial accountability favor is more likely just a statistical adjustment. For one, the increase in real numbers is only 71 more force deployments than last year, which isn’t all that much when compared to the number of police interactions. According to SDPD numbers, officers responded to 520,000 incidents in 2016.

As for the uptick in lower-level force deployment — which is much more significant than the drop in higher-level force use — this is little more than a reflection of a positive change in tactics. In most arrests, some level of force is deployed. If San Diego cops are aware they’re being recorded, they’re less likely to deploy high-level force techniques as quickly as they would in pre-camera days. These numbers show there’s more de-escalation occurring, which naturally results in fewer deployments of high-level force. But since some force is still needed in many cases, the numbers have to go somewhere. And they’ve traveled from the high-level stats to the low-level.

The list of dignitaries and stars who have pampered themselves in the luxurious settings at D’Angleterre Hotel in Copenhagen goes on into infinity.

But really, if they’d wanted to spend the night at an even more expensive (though perhaps not as exclusive) establishment in Denmark, they should have booked themselves in at Vridsløselille Prison in the western Copenhagen suburb of Albertslund.

When Tanveer Ahmed was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in jail for murder last August, Judge Lady Rae said he had committed a “brutal, barbaric and horrific crime”.

Ahmed stabbed to death Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah – who belonged to the persecuted Ahmadi sect – because he believed he was committing blasphemy by uploading online videos in which he claimed to be a prophet.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

So for several years now, the broadband industry (and the politicians, think tankers, and policy folk paid to love them) has desperately tried to claim that the FCC’s net neutrality rules killed investment in broadband networks, clouding the entire telecom market in a dark shroud of “regulatory uncertainty.” And it doesn’t matter how many times we (and others) debunk this claim, it just keeps popping up like an undead groundhog. The reality is this: net neutrality had zero negative impact on the CAPEX, growth, or financials of major broadband providers. It simply isn’t true.

For years, YouTube has served up almost every imaginable kind of video.

The site’s top trending attractions on a recent afternoon included clips of a gymnasium roof collapsing in the Czech Republic, a colossal alligator lumbering across a footpath in Florida, some North Korean refugees digging into American barbecue for the first time, and a guy demonstrating how to wash a car with a baby. (Step one: Hand the baby the hose.) Now, a dozen years after its creation and about a decade after its absorption into Google Inc., YouTube is on the verge of adding yet one more genre—a category of programming that has long eluded it. YouTube is finally getting regular TV.

DRM

Microsoft is launching the Netflix of games, letting people play as many as they want for just $10 a month.

The Xbox Games Pass will be a monthly subscription service that gives access to 100 games, Microsoft has said. As such, it works like Netflix or similar to the PlayStation Now service that Sony has offered for years.

Intellectual Monopolies

The Office of the United States Trade Representative today released its 2017 trade policy agenda. The report includes numerous references to intellectual property rights, mainly focused on enforcement, plans for multilateral discussions on IPR and trade, and promises of an aggressive stance on geographical indications. But overall it is short on overall details about what’s to come with the new administration.

Renewed discussions on the protection of traditional cultural expressions at the World Intellectual Property Organization have produced a new draft text that provides a clearer view of the different ways in which countries see a that treaty could help against misappropriation of indigenous cultural heritage. Divergences remain on core questions such as what and who should benefit from the protection of an international treaty, in which terms, and to what extent.

A panel of indigenous peoples speaking at the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization on a potential treaty protecting their folklore from misappropriation asked that indigenous culture be recognised as unique, and not unduly considered as belonging to the whole of mankind. The keynote speaker chastised the United States position in the committee, criticised a US recent document equating the cultural significance of Santa Claus, pizza and sand paintings, and called for the respect of indigenous peoples’ sovereign rights over their cultural expressions.